Politics and Culture

October 29, 2015

An archaeology of sexual disaster presenting itself as art

Last night's episode of Simon Schama's "Face of Britain" series, on self-portraits, was worth it just for his take on Tracey Emin's - ahem - seminal masterpiece. It comes right at the start:

An archaeology of sexual disaster presenting itself as art. Here, then, is the shrine of celebrity squalor, enthroned like a medieval relic. Instead of holy toe-nails, the unholy soiled sheets; condoms embalmed; half-squeezed lubricants made venerable for the modern art pilgrim.

Tracey Emin's My Bed ought to be what I most hate and despise about some kinds of contemporary art: the orgy of personal self-indulgence; the assumption that art can really be just a document of a broken life in which we ought to be interested; the confusion of exhibitionism with an exhibition.

And yet, there is something to it. There is something odd; there is something magnetic - I don't deny it. In its little corner here, simultaneously miserable and vain-glorious at the same time, it does kind of exude a certain smelly power.

What you might call damning with faint praise.

Even if the series sometimes went off in odd directions, and made - for me - some odd choices (Annie Leibovitz's famous portrait of John and Yoko last week, for instance), it was worth it simply for the pleasure of listening to such sustained eloquence.